Marble Canyon, Grand Canyon, Colorado River – you wanna see baseline tribal behavior? Go on a 20 day river trip

(For more stuff on v-Memes, go here.)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Tribal v-Meme in the last couple of years. Why? Because the Tribal v-Meme is the baseline for social human behavior, and has been Darwinially selected against for literally 100s of thousands of years. That doesn’t mean that all the behavior inside the v-Meme is what we would consider, in the modern age, as prosocial, moral, or good. It does mean that the mix of good and evil that we observe came from somewhere automatically, and sits right on the edge in our brain of both hardware and software. And the stuff that gets waved around by anthropologists and sociologists as “left behind” (often used to sell some behavioral regression by that bunch) isn’t all good. Lots of it IS bad, and cannot get discussed.

The reason it can’t be discussed is because the negative stuff is embedded deep in taboo structures even in contemporary society. Talking about things like rape and child abuse — core elements of tribal cultures — get people excited. But as I’ve written about psychopathy, persistent in humans since the dawn of time, these other unpleasantries are also features — not bugs — and it would help to understand them, since the Left has not only decided some superficial level of their views must be considered in modern decision making — they’re also embodying these structures inside their own social organizations.

We also don’t spend much time realizing that behaviors active in the Tribal v-Meme that contemporary society might endorse is also likely tied to behaviors that same society would not endorse at all. As one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie, said,

“You want the good stuff of being Indian without all the bad stuff, enit?”

—Chess Warm Water, speaking to Betty and Veronica in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, Chapter 6.

(Do note that Alexie has now effectively been canceled, ostensibly for sexual harassment reasons. I can’t comment on this, having not seen the evidence. But Alexie’s message is highly subversive along the same lines – we just don’t get the whole balance of Tribal living, which stabilized humanity enough to start the upward climb to the societies we have today. It’s strangely coincident that he got canceled at the beginning of all this Woke nonsense.)

Take a subject like female rape. There’s no question at all that Tribal v-Meme societies traded women with other tribes when they would collect around shared hunting grounds like the Buffalo Commons. Women could not consensually agree to such behavior. And as a background, rape and group sex were common in Tribal v-Meme societies. The recent Apple TV series, ‘Chief of War’ doesn’t sugarcoat any of this (h/t to Jason Momoa in his striving for authenticity.)

But that also implies that such behavior is deeply embedded in our shared human psyche — especially to be considered in the context of the recent Cornell 7 incident. The notion that the young woman, ‘Jane Doe’, didn’t willingly participate is belied by her follow-up text messages. The only thing that really broke her and changed her tune was being disinvited from the fraternity tribe, aka party, two weeks later. From a Tribal v-Meme memetic perspective, that makes total sense. Whatever circuits fired deep in her brain to have a gang bang with seven frat boys were far more in keeping with her desire for survival than being abandoned, which from a primeval perspective would result in her death. Of course, these emergent thoughts are buried deep. But those are also long-evolutionary-time natural selection-rewarded behaviors.

And even something as violent and socially repugnant as rape itself (with no ambiguity) was likely validated as a Tribal v-Meme survival strategy. Spreading your genes inside another tribe lines up from a sociobiological perspective. But there are other insights. If you look at human populations, they didn’t really jump up until the last 1000 years or so. Why? Because capital violence was also rife in tribal cultures. It could be that the number of active uteruses your tribe possessed had to be in play at all times in order to keep your tribe from going extinct. Hence, rape, while in a modern sense, repugnant, was a valid strategy for producing enough babies to balance off intra-tribal violence. Not exactly an anthropologist’s selling point for making us believe in the politically correct aspirational nature of tribal cultures.

The impetus for this piece today was watching a video where Canadian indigenous people were demanding billionaires’ wealth for one day. Here is the piece.

All this “sounds” so reasonable and contemporary. But it’s also a hallmark of the Tribal v-Meme. Tribes didn’t develop technology with the intent of lifting up any of the surrounding nations to their own. The way you got things you couldn’t make yourself was to steal it from the person that had it. And lest you think somehow that this was just a feature of American Indians, you’d be wrong. The thing that drove the original Mongol invasions of China was desire for fine silks. That started the chain of events for entire Mongol Empire — the greatest in expanse the world has ever known.

But as far as inventing MORE wealth? It simply does not occur in the v-Meme. Far worse than a zero-sum game interpretation — wealth must be taken from others. It’s in the memetics.

Why so much of this matters is it has the potential to tell you the level of mental sophistication of the party across the table that you might happen to be dealing with. If you hear self-aggrandized dogma about the Hazda tribal people in Africa, you are likely dealing with a Tribal Resonator across the table from you. And these things go all the way up. Robert Reich, former Clinton Labor Secretary, has been on the media streams lately demanding nationalization and seizure of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink properties. He’s preaching to a core Democratic base, which has also doubled down on violence to external individuals (witness the praised reaction to the shootings of Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk!) but also to their own that go against core memetic principles inside the party — like the whole trans issue. The Ds just can’t quit this stuff because sexual violation and mutilation is core to creating more psychopathic warriors, which is sadly and crazily enough ALSO a core maintenance behavior of the Tribal v-Meme.

And they’ve made things perfectly clear about what’s going to happen to anyone joining their most hated out-group — the Republican party — if they win the election. Senator (D-Michigan) Elissa Slotkin has spoken publicly (along with Demon-in-chief Hillary Clinton) about the need to make sure any young conservatives realize they will be jailed if they support the Trump administration.

The problem with such deep embedding in the Tribal v-Meme is that the way tribes settle differences rarely involves complex negotiations. It involves unrestrained violence between psychopathic cadres on both sides. That means things like civil war. And there are no wars in history that don’t provide death and destruction like them. The highest American death toll from war was from the American Civil War, where somewhere between 620K-700K Americans lost their lives.

When people tell you who they are memetically, it behooves one to listen. Why? Because memetics, and their v-Memes, are emergent and generative. It’s the unstated future policies we should be concerned with — and those will be in line with the Tribal v-Meme. I’ve never seen an election cycle where there were almost NO real issues being discussed actively, though of course there is some declarative nonsense on the usual campaign literature. I’m getting to the point where I’d welcome a little discussion time spent on mundane issues, such as more or less taxes on the larger body politic, would be welcomed. Because what IS being daylighted on the Democratic side is Tribal politics by any measure. As I wrote in this piece, the Psychopaths are in charge.

As I’ve said many times on this blog, complex modern societies are maintained by complex information, in both quantity and structure. And the current threatened Tribal warfare offers little hope of maintaining the population number and standard of living in contemporary society for anyone. We live in a top-level society based on the Performance v-Meme — which is a good thing. Performance-based societies increase the standard of living for some more than others — this is true. But they also produce more stuff in general. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats.

But any psychosocial devolution due to Tribal memetic forces will not create more of anything. And that is the pathway to violence. Because when there ain’t enough to go around, you gotta get rid of extra people somehow.